One of the more interesting shifts in the music industry over the past few years has been its increasing reliance on sales data from a company called SoundScan. Based in Hartsdale, New York, the operation collects its info from computerized scanners that count an estimated 85 percent of the albums sold in America. Extrapolating from this data, the organization comes up with what it claims is a fairly accurate accounting of the more than half-billion albums sold annually in the U.S. SoundScan’s figures have replaced Billboard’s traditional system of polling record stores for sales data.
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The service, four years old this week, has upended a lot of myths about record sales. It’s unlikely that consumer interest in both country and alternative music, which has boomed over the last few years, can solely account for the huge chart presence of those two genres: plainly, artists from subcultures were undercounted in the pre-SoundScan days (the company’s impending inclusion of sales from more than 1,000 religious bookstores threatens to do the same for Christian music). The service also shows that sales are much more volatile than the old charts indicated: most notably, fans can now be seen to flood stores for new releases. The top ten of Billboard’s 200 album listing, for decades the province of mainstream artists who “climbed the chart” over a period of weeks or months, is now a rough-and-tumble vortex where a profusion of new releases by heavy metal, alternative, rap, and even easy-listening acts fight it out each week to debut in the highest slots, frequently at number one.
Says Mayfield: “I hear a lot of whining. The Nielsen, Arbitron, Gallup, all are based on 1 percent or less of the universe. SoundScan starts with 85 percent of the sales in the retail marketplace. I don’t think it’s going to undercount much.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo manipulation/Victor Thompson.
